Current multimedia messaging technologies for mobile devices depend upon a server that receives and prepares multimedia content to be retrieved by the recipient of the multimedia message. For example, the Multimedia Messaging Service (“MMS”) protocol utilizes a server known as a Multi Media Service Center (“MMSC”) to store multimedia content in preparation for a retrieval process initiated by the recipient. Specifically, under MMS, the initiating device initiates a data connection over TCP/IP and performs an HTTP POST of an MMS Encapsulation Format encoded multimedia message to the MMSC. The MMSC stores the multimedia message and makes it available as a dynamically generated URL link. The MMSC then generates a notification message containing the dynamically generated URL and sends the notification message to the recipient through WAP Push over the Short Message Service (“SMS”) protocol. When the recipient receives the MMS notification message, it initiates a data connection over TCP/IP and performs an HTTP request to retrieve the MMS message containing multimedia content from the MMSC through the dynamically generated URL.
The MMSC is used, in part, by the MMS protocol in order to provide a known address (e.g., a URL) that can be provided to the recipient in a text based format in order to initiate a data transfer transaction to retrieve the multimedia content. Without such a known address, the sender would be unable to transmit multimedia content to the recipient, since other pre-existing messaging technologies (e.g., SMS) only provide the capability to send limited text, and not multimedia content, directly to the recipient. As such, what is needed is a method to establish data transfer sessions directly between mobile devices, where such mobile devices are capable of directly communicating with other mobile devices through the underlying wireless technology, such that no separate multimedia server and separate retrieval notification message is needed to obtain data (e.g., multimedia content) other than text.